‘I’ll tend her,’ Sholer said, looking up, and catching sight of me with my weapons at the ready, no doubt assuming I was desperate to join the fray, instead of just paranoid about being caught by the first ’nids to make it through the door. Come to think of it, there was only one entrance to the chamber. Once they got inside, my chances of getting out would be minimal, and the huge, putrescent mass of their prime target would be drawing them like kroot to carrion. ‘You may join the defensive line.’
‘If you’re sure,’ I said, careful not to overplay the gallantry to the point where I’d be incontrovertibly stuck here.
‘Completely,’ Sholer said, and drew his bolt pistol, more than ready for the fray. Seizing my opportunity, I sprinted from the room.
The corridor outside was full of panicking cogboys, running around in a fashion uncannily reminiscent of the aftermath of the escape of the genestealers. Confusingly, as many seemed to be running towards the sound of the Reclaimers’ bolter fire as away from it, something I at first attributed to a misplaced desire to get stuck in with the improvised weapons most of them were brandishing. Looking around, I saw everything from hastily adapted tools to simple lengths of piping weighted to create heavier clubs, often supplemented with a spike or two, vicious enough to have gladdened the heart of any ork. A few carried more sophisticated armaments, perhaps scavenged from repair shops or hastily assembled from scratch, with bolt pistols and makeshift grenades fashioned from lubricant cans being popular choices. One fellow had even provided himself with a crossbow, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in the scavvy camps of the sump[177].
Having no desire to meet any tyranids head-on myself, I forced my way through the crush away from the sounds of combat, only to discover my error, for a living nightmare was blocking the corridor ahead of me, screeching in furious frustration as it battered against the ceiling and walls with leathery wings. It seemed I’d been right, and the invading hive mind hadn’t taken long to deploy gargoyles against us. I raised my laspistol, cracking off a couple of shots as it rose above the heads of the cogboys blocking my line of fire, but all that succeeded in doing was drawing its attention to me, which was far from what I had in mind.
Dropping the tech-priest it had been savaging, it swooped towards me, bringing up its fleshborer to vomit a charge of deadly beetles in my direction. Fortunately its aim was disrupted by a cogboy showing rather more initiative than good sense, who flung a weighted line at it, which wrapped around the forelimb wielding the living weapon and jerked it aside at the last possible instant. The rain of frantically chewing mandibles pattered harmlessly against the wall of the corridor, only a few strays and ricochets finding living flesh to burrow into. And, given that it was so liberally laced with metal, much good it probably did them[178].
The gargoyle screeched again, and rounded on my unexpected deliverer, its stinger-tipped tail thrusting towards his or her abdomen[179]. One good turn deserved another, particularly with so many witnesses around, so I lashed out with my chainsword, severing the barb before it could penetrate and bringing up the weapon on the backswing to slash at the hovering terror’s exposed underside. ‘Hold on!’ I called encouragingly, although the tech-priest showed no sign of letting go, hauling grimly on the line like a fisherman with the biggest catch of their entire life. A gout of foul-smelling entrails spattered the floor and my much-abused greatcoat, confirming once and for all that it was past salvaging, and the gargoyle battered at me with its leathery wings, trying and failing to bring the fleshborer to bear once more. Seeing its head turn, I ducked, letting the crown of my cap take the gobbet of venom it suddenly spat with the intention of burning my eyes out, and retaliated with another swipe of the chainsword. This time the screaming blade slashed the wing open from top to bottom, spilling the air, and the creature fell heavily to the floor, fluttering about in the slick of its own innards like a sparrow taking a bath.
‘Finish it!’ the tech-priest urged, the even mechanical voice somehow imbued with bloodlust, and leapt forwards, pinning the fleshborer under a mechanical foot with such weight and energy that the sculpted flesh burst like a ripe fruit. That was all the urging the others needed, and they fell on the downed creature like a pack of sump rats on a corpse, hacking and bludgeoning it to paste with club and blade.
‘They’re almost at the top of the shaft, sir,’ Jurgen reported, the sounds of combat echoing hollowly in the background through the tiny vox-receiver in my ear, and I vacillated for a moment before responding. The gargoyle could have been alone, but I doubted it, and if one had found its way inside from the landing platform, the rest of its brood wouldn’t be far behind. Even if they weren’t, there was nothing on the flight deck capable of taking to the air, and I’d simply choke to death in the miasmal atmosphere[180] if the airborne monstrosities didn’t get me first. On the other hand, perilous as joining the defence of the lift shaft would be, at least I’d have Jurgen’s melta and the surviving Reclaimers to hide behind.
‘I’ll be right there,’ I replied, as though I’d never had a moment’s hesitation, and trotted away in the direction of the shooting.
To my surprise a lot of the red robes surrounding me came along too, their blood and lubricants all fired up, apparently eager to bag another ’nid or two, now they’d had a taste of bloodshed. Which was fine by me – the more the merrier, particularly if they were standing between me and the swarm.
I glanced into Sholer’s sanctum as we swept past, but he was still crouched over Clementine’s spasming body, partially obscured behind the screening crates. Even if he was aware of my presence, he seemed too busy to acknowledge it, so I just kept moving, my comet tail of cogboys streaming out behind.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said, as I joined Yail, a couple of Reclaimers, and Jurgen, all of whom were lined up along the Chimera-sized doorway to the freight elevator[181], which had been cranked open to allow them an unrestricted field of fire. Fortunately the hive mind was only throwing creatures capable of climbing against us, which ruled out anything with ranged weapons, but for every hormagaunt or purestrain ’stealer which went plummeting back into the depths, another dozen kept right on coming. ‘Gargoyle got in the way.’
‘I know,’ Yail said, ‘the Land Speeder’s trying to keep them away from the hangar,’ which at least accounted for the absence of the other Reclaimers[182].
I don’t mind admitting I quailed a little as I looked down the vertiginous drop to the sub-levels so far below. The walls of the shaft were seething with chitin, scuttling upwards with malevolent purpose, their rending and scything claws clacking together in an almost deafening cascade of crepitation. The defenders kept pouring fire into them, which I lost no time in adding to with my laspistol, but for all the effect we were having we might just as well have been lobbing rocks. ‘Can’t we get the platform moving, and scrape them off?’ I asked, taking the back of the head off a particularly persistent genestealer with a lucky shot clean through its gaping jaws.
‘We already did,’ Jurgen informed me, sending a melta blast through the torso of another, the thermal backwash sending a couple of the others tumbling back down the shaft by way of a bonus.
‘So trying again would just bring them up faster,’ Yail added, punctuating his words with a burst from his storm bolter, which sent half a dozen gaunts after them in bite-sized chunks.
‘They seem to be moving fast enough already,’ I said, feeling a bit of heroic understatement would go down well about now.
A faint explosion echoed up the shaft. One of the cogboys had got over-excited and lobbed a home-made grenade down it, no doubt having calculated where in its trajectory it was likely to explode[183], showering the ’nids with bits of broken metal.
‘Not as fast as they were,’ Jurgen observed, as though the matter were only of passing interest.
‘They’re slowing down?’ I asked, a sudden flare of hope rising within me, and my aide nodded.
‘They were sticking to the shadows before, using cover.
Now they’re just climbing straight into the line of the guns, so we’re holding ‘em off more easily.’
I tapped the vox-bead in my ear. ‘Sholer,’ I said, trying not to sound too exultant, ‘it seems to be working. Is Clementine still transmitting?’
‘So far as I can tell,’ Sholer said. ‘She’s suffering continual seizures, each more violent than the last. Any one of them could prove fatal.’
‘Then we need to finish this fast,’ I said.
‘I concur.’ Yail’s head inclined a little, that being as close as he could come to a nod encased in the clumsy Terminator suit, and he triggered the remaining rockets in his cyclone rig in a single salvo. A second or so later a firestorm boiled up the shaft, crisping the chitinous horrors clinging to the sides of it even as they were shredded by the hail of shrapnel from the frag charges, and we leapt for our lives as the backwash boiled out through the open door. I hit the metal flooring and rolled, the furnace heat of the overlapping explosions searing my back, and came up, my laspistol pointed at the smoke-blackened portal. Only Yail still stood where he had been, protected from the fury of the blast by the finest armour known to man. After a moment, he spoke. ‘We have prevailed,’ he said simply.
‘We have?’ Strangely unwilling to believe it, I moved slowly to the edge of the abyss, and looked down. Sure enough, the only movement I could see was a few wounded stragglers squirming back into the vents at the bottom of the shaft which had evidently provided them with ingress.
‘Looks like it,’ Jurgen said, sending them on their way with a burst from his lasgun, his unique personal odour already beginning to displace the smell of charred flesh and scorched metal in my nostrils.
‘The gargoyles are also fleeing in disarray,’ Yail informed us, unable to keep a note of satisfaction from his voice.
‘Excellent,’ I said, doing a slightly better job of sounding businesslike; but then I’d had a lot more practice at hiding my feelings. I activated the comm-bead again. ‘You can tell Clementine to stand down.’
‘Unfortunately, I can’t,’ Sholer said, his voice tinged with regret. ‘As I anticipated, her last seizure proved fatal.’
From The Crusade and After: A Military History of the Damocles Gulf, by Vargo Royz, 058.M42.
Commissar Cain’s flash of inspiration, and Astropath Drey’s heroic sacrifice, were to have a far wider effect than either could possibly have anticipated. The inexorable advance of the hive fleet in orbit faltered as the coordinating intelligence lost control of the individual bioships, which began to react instinctively to their current circumstances instead of in pursuit of a wider strategy. The Imperial vessels, on the other hand, were still able to support one another, a tactical advantage they lost no time in exploiting. Rallying as many ships as he could, Admiral Boume began to directly engage the leviathans, which had been left vulnerable, though far from helpless, by the loss of their escorts, killing one and mauling the others so badly that they were forced to flee.
With their loss, the tyranid organisms on the ground reverted to their instinctive behaviour for the most part, only able to act as one in the presence of the synapse creatures sent to herd them, which, of course, became prime targets for the subsequent hunt. Though rumours persist of a few isolated organisms still lurking in the wastelands and the depths of the hive sumps, no reliable sightings have been recorded for nearly three decades, and Fecundia today is officially classified as cleansed. The Imperial Guard garrison established in the wake of the incident, and the indigenous skitarii, remain on the alert, however, for any signs of a fresh incursion.
TWENTY-SEVEN
‘All rather satisfactory,’ I said, sipping my bowl of tanna, and regarding El’hassai through the steam as I contemplated the regicide board between us, a delaying tactic I was certain didn’t fool him for a minute. He was certainly a more challenging opponent than Zyvan, although whether that was because he simply didn’t think like a human, or his profession tended to encourage the use of misdirection and subtlety, I had yet to make up my mind. The Lord General had his hands full negotiating the terms under which the garrison we were leaving behind was supposed to co-operate with Kyper and his skitarii in cleansing Fecundia of the thousands of tyranid stragglers (not surprisingly, he was pressing for full autonomy for the Guard units, while Kyper was equally determined to keep operational matters firmly under his own jurisdiction), leaving him little time for socialising in the relative comfort of the flagship. Though El’hassai would hardly have been my first choice of dinner guest under most circumstances, there were a few outstanding matters nagging at the back of my mind that I felt we should discuss. Partly for my own satisfaction, and partly because I was ever mindful of my covert avocation as Amberley’s eyes and ears. If I was right in my suspicions the Ordo Xenos would probably be quite interested in the conclusions I’d come to in the relatively quiet couple of weeks following the desperate battle in and around Regio Quinquaginta Unus. ‘A bloody nose for the ’nids, and the forge world successfully defended.’
‘Thanks to your ingenuity,’ the tau said, his attention apparently entirely on the move I made. He studied the board for a moment, and turned one of my pieces, with an unmistakable air of satisfaction. ‘And that of Apothecary Sholer. Unfortunately we seem unlikely to be able to use the same stratagem in the defence of other worlds.’
‘Unfortunately so,’ I agreed. The tau certainly couldn’t, anyway, not having any astropaths to project a jamming signal with, and Sholer seemed pretty convinced that we needed a living hive node to produce one anyway, which weren’t exactly thick on the ground. He was urging Kyper and the Death Korps to round up as many live tyranids as possible, to see if he could make the trick work with recorded or synthesised data, but so far would only allow that it was a promising line of enquiry, which could mean decades of research before anything useful emerged from the analyticum. Come to that, I couldn’t see either Guardsmen or skitarii exactly falling over themselves to round up ’nids they could just as easily pot from a safe distance. ‘But at least what’s left of the hive fleet will be a lot easier for your ships to pick off when it hits Dr’th’nyr.’
‘Especially since the astropath attached to the Imperial observers has given them adequate warning of its approach,’ El’hassai said. He inclined his head courteously. ‘For which we thank our allies, of course.’
‘One good turn deserves another,’ I said, turning a piece of his own. ‘If you hadn’t warned us the hive fleet was coming in the first place, Fecundia might easily have fallen.’ I took another sip of tanna. ‘In fact it almost did anyway, taking a substantial chunk of Battlefleet Damocles with it.’ Which would have left half the Imperial systems in the Gulf open to an unopposed land grab by the tau. More than enough to compensate them for the loss of the single world they’d handed back to us on the brink of seizing it, and which they no doubt expected to regain before too long in any case.
‘But it didn’t,’ El’hassai said evenly, studying the board again. ‘And your ships are being refitted even as we speak.’
‘Quite so.’ I savoured another mouthful of the bitter liquid, and held out my tanna bowl, which Jurgen refilled with his usual quiet efficiency. ‘Ready for our return to Quadravidia.’
‘Quadravidia?’ The tau diplomat tilted his head in a perfect imitation of human surprise. ‘Surely it’s adequately defended by the merchantmen delivering infrastructural enhancements?’
‘A burden the unexpected survival of our warships can relieve them of,’ I said. ‘Just as the unexpected survival of Fecundia can relieve the tau empire of the burden of supporting an Imperial world. I’m sure those resources will be far better employed in defending your borders against the tyranids.’
If I’d been looking at a human face, I’m pretty sure the expressions I’d seen flickering across them would have been surprise, chagrin, and possibly amusement, but then he was a diplomat, and a xenos one to boot, so it’s more than likely he was just projecting what he thought I wanted to see.
‘Indeed it is.’ I raised my tanna bowl in a good-humoured toast, which, after a moment, El’hassai echoed, with barely a trace of irony. ‘You might almost say the Greater Good demands it.’
[On which somewhat frivolous note, this extract from the Cain archive comes to a typically self-congratulatory conclusion.]
About The Author
Sandy Mitchell is a pseudonym of Alex Stewart, who has been writing successfully under both names since the mid 1980s. As Sandy, he’s best known for his work for the Black Library, particularly the Ciaphas Cain series. He’s recently completed an MA in Screenwriting at the London College of Communication, which left far less time than usual for having fun in the 41st Millennium, and is looking forward to spending more time in the Emperor’s service now that it has concluded.
An extract from Fire Caste by Peter Fehervari
On sale March 2013
Something darted from the trees behind him, buzzing like an angry insect. Iverson spun round firing, but the sleek white saucer streaking towards him zipped between his snapshots, skimming high above the ground on an anti-gravity field. The disc was only about a metre in diameter, but Iverson knew that a soulless intelligence guided the machine. It was only a drone, its artificial brain no more sophisticated than a jungle predator, but the very existence of such a thing was blasphemous.
Blueskin technology is a heresy upon the face of the galaxy!
Of more immediate concern were the twin pulse carbines mounted on the underside of the drone. As the disc whirled to dodge his fire those guns rotated independently to lock on him. He dived aside as they spat a stuttering enfilade of plasma. The dive slipped into a fall, saving him from a second burst as the machine whizzed by. He rolled over and fired after it, catching it with a couple of rounds as it banked into a turn, but his shots only mottled its carapace. Chattering angrily the drone soared back towards him.
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